Tribute
by totaltheTERRIER
Summary: When Edward opens his eyes, it's September in New York City, and the sky is falling. Compliant with the end of the original anime, but with a very different city and century.


Fast. Too fast. There were no final words, just a startled sort of 'glurg-_uh_' and a shudder that tore through him with all the force of Death itself. There was a wet ripping noise as he slid off of the sword-arm, the flesh and blood spear of his _brother_, his father's son, Hohenheim's greatest sin. It was too fast and his other brother, his little brother, was screaming, and there was no time to say goodbye. Just an endless stare at a ballroom sky and the name that died on his lips as the chandeliers spun and the light flickered, flickered, and went out in a wink.

And then, too fast, he was waking, swimming up from that sea of light and blood. He felt first his mouth, dry and gritty, his tongue laden with dust. Was this what hell was like?

One by one his senses adjusted to the world of the living—or the dead—and he could distinguish the yellow-pink of his eyelids that meant wherever he was, the sun was shining. He could hear his own inhale and exhale, slow, surprised. He had not expected to wake up. He was leaning on something, and that something was warm. Somehow, all his fears seemed distant, blurred, as he sunk into that warm side.

_Inhale, __exhale_.

Breathing is good, he recalled from somewhere. If you don't breathe you're dead. Like I was.

I was dead?

Huh. Suppose so.

_Inhale, __exhale_. A spicy-sweet smell was tickling his nostrils, like ashes and oranges. It teased him with memories, of a forbidden room and old books and the silhouette of a broad back suspended forever against an open door.

His even breathing hitched as his eyes shot open and he snapped upright as if someone had just informed him that the sky was falling. (And if he had looked out the window, he would've seen it was.) But sure enough, there was no mistaking that cloying scent, and its owner shifted beside him.

"Edward? Is everything alright?" The man's deep voice was…concerned? But this wasn't happening; none of this could possibly be real. He slid farther away from the voice, as far as he could get in this tiny suffocating car, and pressed himself back into the seat. When had he gotten into a car? The last thing he could remember was the flickering light, and _oh_, his brother. Memories flashed by in reverse order, so fast it made him dizzy, but now he knew one thing was for sure: Hohenheim should be dead, and so should he.

He ignored the old man and closed his eyes, biting back a wave of nausea. Before, in that haze of dreaming awakeness, it had almost felt like he was another person—one without pain, without sin, without promises they would pay any price to keep. But Ed had never been one for ignorance, and what use was living that life if it was a lie? If, by some miraculous occurrence, he truly was alive, then his first priority would be to save Al. And kick the asses of whoever had sent him here.

Currently, he was in a moving vehicle, and there were no open windows. The thing reeked of cigarette smoke and Hohenheim's permanent odor of masked death. Was it just him or were the cars here…yellower than usual? Through the grimy pane he was pressed up against, Ed squinted at the unbelievable amount of traffic surrounding them. Had the military begun blocking off roads? Inevitably his eyes sought sky, and he found all the other inconsistencies of this strange waking-death engulfed by the inconceivable reality that the clouds were on fire.

That had to be the explanation for the heavy dark smoke that brushed the tips of the buildings stretching up, up—much farther up then he remembered, actually. A hundred stories more of up, and hundreds more of them then he had even seen before in one place. Fingers gripping the cracked vinyl of his seat, he twisted resentfully toward his father:

"Where the—" he stopped abruptly, hands clenched rigidly beside him. His hands. Both of them. Both of his hands were pressing against the seat, both of his hands could feel the worn stitching, the rip in the farthest seam. (Oh, he had never prayed but he prayed now that the sticky substance beneath his startled fingertips was _not_gum, he deplored the stuff after the braid incident of Central Command that need never, ever be spoken of again.) But deplorable, spit-infused glob beside, he could _feel_ these things with the hand he had sacrificed, the sacrifice he had never regretted but the one that he was never sure would be redeemed.

And there! Quickly he bent down to the hem of his pants—what _was_ he wearing anyway? The pants some kind of blue-grey denim like the material of Winry's favorite work overalls, shirt pressed white with buttons. Ed had never had the patience for buttons, not after losing his dominant hand. Recoiling from the alien-ness of it all, he was struck with a sudden longing for his trademark crimson coat. He had worn it like he was dipped in blood, endowed it with such until it came to represent his past and present, nightmares and dreams for the future; it was as much a part of him as his automail had been, and he was naked without it.

But both his coat and his metal were gone now, blood and bone in the place of screws and plates. Strange how vulnerable he seemed now, without his limbs of steel. Flesh was so fragile, he mused; once it's gone it's gone for good (unless you're willing to abandon morals and conscience and pour every desire into an array sealed in blood). Straightening, he met Hohenheim's frown with a scowl.

"What's going on, old man? You're dead. I'm dead. Is this some kind of trick of the Gate?"

The old man's eyes narrowed. "What did you say?"

"What is going on?" Ed repeated fiercely. "Where are we? What happened to Dante? Rose? And _where__'__s_ _Al?_"

Hohenheim studied him intently, and Ed flushed. Still he met his father' eyes with his own, distrust and accusation flashing like the sparks in the sky until the old man broke his gaze and turned away, suddenly looking all his millennia of age.

"I'm afraid this is not the world you're accustomed to, Edward." He said his name with a different taste then before, something weighted and wearied.

"What does that mean? Is this the afterlife?"

Hohenheim just looked at him. "This is the other side of the gate," he said simply.

"Yeah, okay, so what? Am I dead?"

The old man hesitated. "I'm…not sure. After Dante split the union of my soul, my mind, and my body, the Gate sent me here. As for you, well; up until a minute ago, I was speaking to a very different Edward."

"What do you mean?" Edward (the _only _Edward, he thought) snapped.

"The body you inhabit is not your own."

His eyes widened. That was preposterous! Still, his eyes were torn to the cracked mirror dangling above their driver. There were his eyes, yes, nose, mouth still intact; but who had cut his hair?

"I've discovered that here, there are people who resemble very much people from our own world." Their driver's eyes flashed in the mirror, and Ed was startled by the shocking red he had not seen since Lior. Another ghost walking? "I believe your soul has latched onto the equivalent of your body here," his father continued.

"Yeah, right—and where exactly would _here_ be?"

"They call this city New York," Hohenheim frowned out the window at the black smoke that marred this clean morning sky, the crush of vehicles and stunned onlookers that crowded the wide street. "Apparently there's been a fire in the building where I work, and—"

"This is as far as I can take you," the driver interrupted, halted by the scene ahead. The old man nodded, slipping him a few more bills than was necessary for the fare.

"Please bring my son home," his father ordered, and turned to leave, to leave _again, _and oh, Ed had a steel wall around his heart as solid as any automail, so why did it still hurt to see him leave? He was not six anymore, not a child, not weak or powerless or unworthy; like his father, he had crossed a river of sin and never looked back.

"No," he said sharply—_this __time __is __different, __bastard;__ I__'__m__ not __being__ left__ behind,__ not __anymore._ His hand found the handle and he stepped out into the sea of chaos, for chaos had been his world for so long now that he didn't quite know himself without it.

The old man called his name but he began to run, hurling himself into this world, these people. Sirens wailed past but he heard only the angry throb of his pulse, insisting that his father meant nothing to him and if he could just believe that then it wouldn't hurt so much.

_If__ you __leave __first, __no __one __can __leave __you._ _I __only__ learned __from__ the __best,__ pops._

(Hohenheim stared after Edward's retreating back, broad with the weight of two worlds, and realized of all the mistakes he had made throughout his life, the worst had been letting his sons grow up without him.)

Every step brought Ed further into the nightmare. He didn't care what _he_ thought, this world was as much of a hell as he'd suspected. All around him people were staggering—men with battered briefcases and women clutching broken heels, all with this silent look of disbelief, some touch of a sheltered life now missing in their eyes. He knew that look, had become well acquainted with it and then some. It was familiar as an old drinking buddy, raising an empty glass to reality; the drink of the devil.

Yet even amidst this great and final loss of innocence, these "New York-ers" showed no signs of succumbing to despair. As he walked, faster now, he saw a purple-haired girl sharing her water bottle with a grey-faced man in a dust-coated suit. A small crowd had formed around a dark skinned boy with dreadlocks, who was lending out one of the strange telephones without cords. A weeping woman exchanged tissues with another whose tears ran black down her freckled cheeks.

Vehicle after vehicle with piercing red and blue lights sped by, and he followed their path to the core of this disaster, where two towers perched like a pair of twisted steel ladders broken off from the tainted sky. Dark smoke and orange flame poured from a jagged wound in one twin's metal heart. _Airplane_, he had heard repeated—whatever that was. _Accident _or _deliberate _had floated by, each heavy with a separate horror.

But Ed had never been a particularly pensive person, and he had made his decision when he stepped out of the taxi, that the _how_ or _why _didn't matter—he was _here,__ now, _and he'd be damned if he was going to stand back and watch this inferno burn itself out.

* * *

><p>Richard Mustang glared up at the searing sky, managing to hold his gaze only briefly against the sting of smoke and ash. At his hip, his radio squawked, and he swore as he grappled for it, pushing the button to speak with fingers he had long since given up pretending weren't shaking in this September morning. "Hughes—Dammit, where are you?"<p>

The battered device crackled, but Richard could hear an answering sharp cough. "Forty-fifth floor—stairs are choked, Roy, I can't—_see__—_" his response broken off by a severe stream of hacks punctuated by words Richard hadn't heard out of his friend in years, since the birth of his treasured daughter. Everyone back at the station had quickly learned to flee when he whipped out his cell phone, loaded with images of little Elise and her mother, Grace. But today, Richard's only care would be to ensure Matt Hughes would return home that night to his darlings to take enough pictures to fill a million phones.

"Just hold on, Matt—I'm coming to get you," Richard ordered, thrusting the radio back into his belt without waiting for a response. Shove the promotion; he wasn't about to stand back and shout commands into a damn radio while his men were trapped. "Havoc! Fuery!" John and Caleb looked up at him from their hastily gripped blueprints of the North Tower. "Take over here, I'm heading up."

"But, sir—" Caleb yelped, the rest lost to the dull roar of the mob as Richard shoved into the desperate mass of people streaming from the overwhelmed building. Those two would be fine—Caleb's position as head of communications prevented the young man from following him, while John had a good head on his shoulders and knew his duty was to take Richard's place.

He was nearly at the doors now when he saw a short blond head, far too short to be a worker or responder, struggling to make his way into the lobby. "Hey—_hey_," he yelled, reaching for the boy's collar. "Get out of here, kid!"

The kid—teen, he saw now—glanced back with wide golden eyes. "Mustang?" he mouthed in disbelief.

"Yes," Richard growled, wondering how the kid had been able to read his tag in this crowd. "What are you doing here? You need to leave, now! This is dangerous—"

The kid gave him a withering look. "Just who do you think I am? Now, let me _go_, I can help these people!" He wrenched himself away and brought his hands together with a resounding clap.

_Am__ I__ supposed __to __be__ impressed?_ The kid stared at his hands in shock as the crowd continued to push and pull, and the clouds continued to burn. "Enough with the games, kid," Richard snapped, grabbing the boy again and depositing him in the path of a bookish-looking young secretary. An outraged shriek blasted through the crowd—"Who're you calling so short it would take a telescope to see him from a second floor window—"

To Richard's disappointment, the rest of Shorty's rant was eclipsed by a colossal explosion and a fireball blooming like a burnt rose in a garden of utter hell.

Richard threw himself toward the blond again as the hysterical librarian screamed, intent on dragging his ungrateful ass to safety, or at least somewhere with a greater chance of immediate survival. Muscling through the terrified crowd, he searched for his team. _There_, John and Caleb hadn't strayed—he burst into their circle of command and yanked the boy forward. "What's your name?" he yelled above the cacophony. The boy stared at the three men with a 'you-have-got-to-be-shitting-me' look on his face before he replied. "Edward. Edward Elric."

"Alright then, Havoc, Fuery—Elric's your responsibility," Richard shouted. "I'm going back for Hughes." The silence at his waist reminded him of how little time he had to lose. As he turned to reenter the fray, he saw for the first time the epicenter of the explosion, and all the world went white as his brain fought to process the sight of the second building burning as furiously as the first.

_Rachel._

He had sent her into the remaining tower to direct evacuations, seeking to keep her safe, never dreaming that this lighting might strike twice. And now she was trapped in the same forest fire of steel trees, glass and paper leaves shriveling in the unbearable heat. Dizzily he spun to face his crew, and saw in their faces that they knew. "Men, I—"

"Hang on," Elric interrupted, staring at a spot over Richard's left shoulder. "Where's your girl—Hawkeye?" He took in the men's sick faces and his scorched gold eyes grew wide. Richard gritted his teeth; every second they stood here gaping was a second Matt or Rachel might not have.

"I'll go in for Hughes," John said firmly, ignoring Caleb's squeak. "Hawkeye's yours."

"No way," Richard shot back. "We need you in command." _I__'__m__ not__ endangering __any __more__ of__ my__ men._ "Hawkeye's one of the best we have, and besides, she was leading the evacuations. I know she'll get out just fine."

_Liar_, his heart reminded him with every dangerous beat, pulse ticking like the desperate second hand on the too-loud wall clock of mortality. Every instinct screamed for him to run to her, that they were wasting too much time, precious seconds and milliseconds, and he had to make a choice—

"Go to her," Elric said suddenly. When Richard didn't move, he said it louder—"Go! I'll take care of Hughes, I swear, I'll protect him with my life."

This was wrong in so many ways, there were so many reasons why he shouldn't be agreeing, shouldn't even be considering this. Yet he was, and he pinned the boy's gaze with his own.

"How do you know Hughes?" Richard asked deliberately.

The boy grinned roughly, a smile that took away some of the demons from his eyes, and a smile that Richard knew only Matt Hughes could have put there. "He threw me a birthday party," was all the brat said, before dodging Caleb and breaking through their circle in a path cleaved straight for the first stricken building.

"_Elric!__"_

* * *

><p>Rachel Hawkeye is on the twenty-second floor when the plane strikes. She remains at her stairwell position until Richard appears, clinging to a railing while terrified inhabitants stampede past, and the look on his face tells her quite clearly that they are going to spend the rest of their lives together, however brief that rest might be. They are together when the building begins to buckle.<p>

Matt Hughes is carried down forty-five flights of stairs. He remembers none of it but a young voice and a snarl: _not__ again_ before he is breathing clean air and his savior has gone back for the secretary stranded eleven stories up. He hears later that the boy never came down.

Several blocks away from Ground Zero, a rotting man sits on the curb and begins to understand the unique agony of waiting for someone who will never return.

* * *

><p>This story is fiction, but the events of that day, September 11th, 2001, are true. Terrorists did hijack several U.S. airplanes, flying two into New York City's two World Trade Centers, also known as the Twin Towers. Nearly an hour after collision, the second World Trade Center collapsed with hundreds still trapped inside. The first tower followed thirty minutes later. During those hours, many inhabitants cut off from rescue collapsed from smoke inhalation or chose death freely by air rather than fire. Many first responders perished in their duty, or were sickened by the toxic dust released from the destruction.<p>

Every passenger and crew member aboard the hijacked airplanes was killed. More suffered at the hijackers' other targets, one a government building and the other unknown. The last intended location may forever remain unknown, for one flight managed to overpower their oppressors in time to direct the crash away from their destination and into an empty field, at the cost of their own lives.

This story was not posted with any kind of political motivation, merely written as an attempt to reconcile with myself the horrible tragedy so many experienced that day. The attack was on the United States, but its effects have been felt worldwide. I have tried to keep all details as historically accurate as possible, but please forgive me if you find error. This is a sensitive subject for many, and I mean no dishonor with this interpretation-by adding these characters, I simply hope to help others connect with and understand what truly happened, and to honor all those who truly lost their lives on 9/11.

For all who died, you will never be forgotten.

This is my tribute.


End file.
